In 1990, a film crew turned up at a house in Llwynhendy, near Llanelli.

Around the dinner table were four generations of the same family. The cameras were there to document the language relationships between them.

The two young children spoke English to each other, Welsh to their father, and English to their mother.

The parents spoke English to each other. The father spoke Welsh to both his parents, and they to him. But his parents spoke English to each other. The children spoke Welsh to their grandparents. They also spoke Welsh to their great-grandmother.

Presumably, this will have seemed unusual to BBC viewers outside Wales, where the short film was broadcast late at night from time to time over the coming years.

But it would have come as no surprise to people in Wales. It's a pattern you still see around the country 30 years later. And you'll just as easily find families and dinner tables where Welsh is the only language spoken, with no question that it should ever be anything but.

It'll also be the case among groups of friends, in schools, in work and on sports teams. And it's the reason we didn't switch to Welsh when the English speaker walked into the pub - we were already speaking it before he came in.

Walk into Tafarn Sinc in the Preseli mountains in Pembrokeshire and a sign on the bar invites you to "start every conversation in Welsh".

That's also what Meryl Davies does in Caffi'r Atom in Carmarthen, where she works.

"I use it every day," she says.

"It comes out naturally. I work in an establishment that deals with customers so it's the first language I speak to them when I see them. Obviously, if they don't speak Welsh then I have to turn to English."

But here's the thing: to people who speak Welsh, this debate is bizarre, insulting and many other things in between. Perhaps if a Welsh speaker had appeared on Newsnight, they could have pointed this out.

Here's why: for thousands and thousands of first language Welsh speakers, the language is a natural part of life that we've known since we could talk. It's the language we speak to our parents, the language we speak in school and to friends. It's not, as the debate is often framed by non Welsh speakers, some challenge that needs to be thrust upon us by government programmes and laws and taxpayers' money. It's not something that hinders us in school or at university or looking for a job - quite the contrary. Speaking Welsh doesn't mean we can't also learn French, or Spanish, or mathematical terms. In fact, research shows it actually gives us a head start.

In that programme's messy aftermath, someone on Twitter asked if they'd also be analysing whether birdsong was a "help or hindrance" to the forest. Daft, yes. But no dafter than asking if Welsh was a help or hindrance to Wales, the premise for the Newsnight debate.

That's not to say that effort, legislation and money aren't required. They are. For Welsh to thrive, speakers must have the ability to live their lives in their mother tongue - socially, professionally and administratively.

But when you're talking to your mamgu, or over the garden wall, or with your friends at school, or with colleagues at work, or texting mates, you're not making a political or nationalistic point. You're being yourself. In Wales. In 2017.

"It's what comes out when I speak to dogs and babies, when I say goodnight to my little nephew or when I said goodbye to my grandmother for the very last time," says Sian Harries, a comedy writer from Carmarthen, who still speaks Welsh every day despite now living in London.

"My best friend and I slip into Welsh whenever we need to discuss something personal. I don't know why, I suppose because we find it comforting.

"I don't begrudge people who don't speak Welsh or anyone who won't learn it. I only get angry when I'm told I'm not allowed to speak it. When I'm told I'm 'being political' when to me it's the most natural thing in the world."

Sian Harries: 'Welsh isn't exclusive, how can it be with words like cwtch, hiraeth and bendigedig?' (Image: S4C)

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For Angharad Morgan, Welsh is the language of text messages, What's App and Facebook groups. The 18-year-old from Briton Ferry, near Neath, just finished her A-levels at the Welsh-medium Ysgol Gyfun Ystalyfera and is heading to Oxford University to study biological sciences.

"I text some of my family in Welsh and some of my friends that speak Welsh as their first language. I was one of the head prefects at my school and we had a Facebook group chat that we used to plan school events and activities - we always spoke Welsh together in that. My phone language is even set to Welsh!" she says.

It's the same for Lowri Davies, a 36-year-old from Cilgerran, now living in Cardiff.

"People don't seem to realise that speaking Welsh and switching from Welsh to English is a completely normal and subconscious part of life," she says.

"I feel almost embarrassed that such an important element of my and my family's life comes under scrutiny again and again... usually citing 'the cost' of maintaining the language, and you hear phrases such as 'waste of money' and 'who speaks Welsh anyway?' I’m raising my one-year-old son bilingual, Welsh being his first language. I can’t wait to hear him speak Welsh."

As it happens, the amount of money spent specifically on the Welsh language is difficult to pin down - it's money spent on different things by several different government departments in Wales and Westminster, as well as by local authorities and other public bodies.

You'll occasionally hear the figure of £150 million being suggested as the expenditure on Welsh language provision. This would take in S4C, the Welsh language commissioner and things like small grants for Welsh language media. But in terms of definite figures, you can say that £81 million is spent on S4C (£74.5 million of this comes from the licence fee and £6.7 million from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport).

The Welsh Government spends £29 million on "Welsh language education provision" (it couldn't be more specific) and £6.9 million on promoting the Welsh language.

What you can say with certainty is that it's money that should be spent. People in Wales should be able to access services (including health and social care) in Welsh if they want to. And in any case, the money's a drop in the ocean. The claim put forward - as columnist Julian Ruck did on Newsnight - that the money spent on Welsh could go to the NHS instead is ludicrously simplistic. The money spent on the NHS and on education is measured in billions, not millions.

It's also money that's necessary if Welsh is not going to decline further.

"Government is hugely important in helping smaller languages to play catch-up. Indeed, without government support the further decline of a language in such a condition is almost entirely inevitable," says Professor Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost of Cardiff University, an authority on linguistic minorities and language planning.

"The evidence tells us that the effective intervention of government is crucial to preventing further decline and in stabilizing the position of the smaller language. [But] government, in a liberal democratic society, can only do so much. Community-based and voluntary action has a crucial role to play, as indeed does the language use of individual speakers of the language."

There can come a point beyond which it is unlikely that a language will survive as a living, spoken language. Welsh "is not at that point and, indeed, is not close to that point", says Prof Mac Giolla Chríost.

Neither is it a stale language, existing only on road signs and among the elderly who'll die off and take the language with them. There are 420 Welsh-medium primary schools in Wales, and 49 secondary schools. They teach 100,000 pupils. In Cardiff, three new primary schools are being built to cope with the growing demand for Welsh medium education. There are concerns, however, noted by Prof Mac Giolla Chríost, that "while Welsh-medium education, however one defines that, has grown over a number of decades... statutory education does not produce competent speakers of Welsh to the extent that it should".

Angharad Morgan got four A*s at A-level. She is thought to be one of the three or four top-performing students in Wales, dropping only a handful of marks. She has gone to Welsh-medium schools all her life.

"Up until A-level I did all my subjects in Welsh. The only subjects I’ve ever done in English are my science A-levels - since I’m doing biology at university I thought it would be easier to learn all the terminology in English now rather than have to translate them from Welsh next year. I never found that doing my subjects in Welsh was a bad thing - the concepts and facts I learned are still exactly the same, except I can talk about them in either Welsh or English now. I used to be a peer mentor, where younger students would come to me with any problems or for help with homework, and these meetings were always held in Welsh too."

Angharad Morgan: 'My phone language is even set to Welsh!' (Image: Angharad Morgan)

"Fundamentally I think anti-Cymraeg arguments come from a place with a lack of joy. Welsh’s existence despite the odds doesn’t make them happy, they see it as an albatross, because they believe it’s dead," says Elena Cresci, who works for Channel 4 News and is from Dinas Powys in the Vale of Glamorgan.

"For me, and thousands of others, it’s very much alive - something I’ve learnt making videos for [YouTube channel] Sianel Pump and [S4C programme] Hansh. Welsh is seen as something corporate and stale, but the people who make fun Welsh-language Facebook and YouTube videos prove it’s not just a language for the history books. I even have English friends who watch our videos, because now they know Welsh can be pretty cool. I love my current relationship with the Welsh language - it feels more natural than it ever has.

"I gleefully wrote an entire live blog of Wales’ epic game against Belgium in Welsh for the Guardian, not caring a jot that I didn’t know nearly as much about football as everyone else on the sports desk and my grammar was all over the place.

"It was a joyful celebration of a historic moment in Welsh sport – and it felt so right it was in Welsh. Oh, and I got 'cer i grafu' into the Guardian before I left, so that’ll be going on the CV for sure. In fact, I’d go as far as saying I’ve had certain opportunities via Welsh media I would never have had in English. I’m very lucky to work at Channel 4 News now, on a digital team which really gets the internet. But my first foray into video was in Welsh, and that’s where I got the experience to get this job in the first place."

Elena Cresci (Image: Elena Cresci)

Hostility towards Welsh has existed for centuries. It would be difficult to say it is as old as the language itself, because the first Welsh may have been written down as early as 600AD, a time when the Latin of Rome was the only written medium throughout what had been the Western Empire and there were virtually no attempts to write Latin's daughter languages, French, Spanish or Italian, until after 1000AD.

Still, its imminent extinction has been confidently predicted many times since, including in the 17th and 18th centuries, when literacy in Welsh actually spread rapidly and Wales was one of the few countries with a literate majority. In the 1850s, readership of Welsh-language periodicals numbered in the tens of thousands. A collection of one Welsh poet's works sold 30,000 copies and the Eisteddfod became a central element in the lives of those who spoke Welsh. Still, shortly afterwards, convictions were again being voiced that, as historian John Davies put it, "the lifespan of the Welsh language was swiftly drawing to a close".

There were still places in Wales where no one could speak English in the 20th century. In the 1930s there were nearly 100,000 people who could speak only Welsh.

"Welsh has been slowly losing ground to English over a number of centuries," says Prof Mac Giolla Chríost.

"However, one could say that, relatively speaking, the relationship between Welsh and English in society in Wales has become increasingly balanced in recent decades, to the extent that Welsh has even gained some ground in some important areas. This is particularly clear in public life, including the education system and as regards public services in general. That said, the condition of Welsh-English bilingualism, and the loss of monoglot Welsh speakers, has meant that the Welsh language has undergone extensive change since the second half of the 20th century. That change is ongoing."

Sian Harries says: "I understand why people are militant. My great-grandfather was whipped as a child for speaking [Welsh] so he and my grandfather vowed never to speak English. Welsh isn't exclusive, how can it be with words like 'cwtch' and 'hiraeth' and 'bendigedig'? Gorgeous paintings of words hanging up there for all to enjoy.

"It's pure luck that I speak it. When I was little my father was concerned a Welsh medium school would perhaps limit me if I ever wanted to study beyond Wales. Luckily for me, someone convinced him otherwise and it now just means I write for S4C and Channel 4. It means I have double the amount of jokes in my head - knackering yes, but in no way limiting."

But 23% said they could speak some Welsh (but not fluently) and there was a substantial increase in the number of younger people saying this (between the ages of three and 29). In the 2011 census, 562,000 people said they could speak Welsh (around 431,000 said they could speak, read and write it). A third of this group were aged between three and 15.

Dig a little deeper and there are interesting, tangible hints in the survey to how people use Welsh every day, with half of fluent Welsh speakers saying they use at least as much Welsh as English when texting and half of Welsh speakers saying they try to use Welsh to deal with public organisations.

"Obviously, the results from the latest census indicate that there are demographic weaknesses in that the language is vulnerable in its traditional heartlands and in relation to intergenerational transmission. In-migration by non-Welsh speakers to some of those parts of Wales where the Welsh language is dominant... remains challenging. Also, out-migration of Welsh-speakers from the same parts also remains challenging."

The percentage of people who are able to speak Welsh by local authority (Image: Welsh Government)

A survey of more than 3,000 voters in the 2016 Welsh Election Study looked at attitudes to Welsh language and found that only 16% of people agreed that "the Welsh language is a nuisance and Wales would be better off without it". Further, 53% of people agreed that "more should be done to preserve Welsh as a living language" (20% disagreed).

"The balance of public opinion in Wales is very strongly weighted against the idea of the Welsh language being a ’nuisance’," Professor Roger Scully wrote at the time, perhaps making it all the more bemusing why the language should constantly be subjected to debates over its worth.

"By contrast, a clear, if modest, majority of our sample indicated support for the idea that more should be done to preserve Welsh as a living language."

And language is more than just a means to communicate. It's an important part of our identity. Leah Williams is a 20-year-old from Cardigan. She speaks Welsh with her family, friends and boyfriend, as well as in work to customers and colleagues.

Currently studying international relations and politics at Cardiff University, she lives in a house of 10 women, five of whom are studying Welsh. They go to Welsh gigs, compete in the Eisteddfod and are members of the university's Welsh society, which is 200-strong. One of her housemates has spent the summer in Patagonia teaching Welsh to schoolchildren.

Leah Williams

"Being bilingual can provide new career opportunities and improve your personal life, but the reason why I live my life through the medium of Welsh is much deeper than that," she says.

"It's part of my identity, it's part of Wales' identity. For someone to call that unnatural or even a hindrance is insulting and ignorant. Being bilingual, being Welsh and speaking the Welsh language is the most natural thing in my life."